[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The GreatViews expressed here are not necessarily the views & opinions of ActivistChat.com. Comments are unmoderated. Abusive remarks may be deleted. ActivistChat.com retains the rights to all content/IP info in in this forum and may re-post content elsewhere.

isn't it surprising how this important event was completely ignored by American media as well as the world?

where are the reports? where are the photos?

I want one of them Iran/ Israel flags printed back to back. loved it.

THANK YOU!

Dear Liberty if you go to www.standwithus.com you will see several pictures there. For some reason I cannot transfer pictures to this web (it shows blank spaces), maybe you can put them on this site. Thanks

Antar:.......NUKES! WE NEED NUKES! THE 12 IMMAN HAS DECREED THAT NO INFIDEL ZIONIST DOG SHOULD LIVE, AND HAS SENT ME, TO SALVAGE THE REVOLUTION. DIPLOMATS? WE DON"T NEED NO STINKING DIPLOMATS , I AM RECALLING ALL OF THEM> BANKERS? WE DON"T NEED NO STINKING BANKERS< WE"LL PLUNDER THE INFIDEL'S RICHES.
STOCK MARKET? WE DONT NEED NO STINKING STOCK MARKET< IT'S UNISLAMIC ANYWAY! REFORMERS? WE DONT NEED NO STINKING REFORMERS< WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE THINK THIS IS< A DEMOCRACY? GIVE ME A GUN< I"LL PUT THE COUP DE GRACE IN THEM MYSELF!
THE UN? WE DONT NEED NO STINKING UN< THEY ARE THE TOOL OF THE ZIONIST DOGS AND WILL BE NUKED ALONG WITH THE REST OF THEM> GIVE ME NUKES< GIVE ME NUKES I TELL YOU> WE"LL SOLVE ALL OUR PROBLEMS WITH NUKES!

PALO ALTO, California -- The Bible is full of praise for Persia (today's much-maligned Iran) and for its rulers. In the Book of Ezra, God speaks through the proclamations of Cyrus, the king of Persia, who declares, "The Lord God of Heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem."

Cyrus acceded to this divine command, and thus was the Second Temple in Jerusalem built. In other parts of the Old Testament, there is ringing praise of Cyrus as God's "anointed" and the "chosen" ruler, who freed Jews from their Babylonian captivity.

The Jewish feast of Purim celebrates the story of how Esther, queen to a Persian king, saved the Jews of the kingdom from annihilation. But along with the benevolence of Cyrus and the wisdom of Esther, there also lurked on the horizon the evil vizier, Haman of the race of Agog, whose mind and heart were darkened by rancor and hate.

Today, there sits in place of Cyrus one who has inherited not the magnanimity of Cyrus, but the malice of Haman: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who openly calls for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

Even in the modern history of Iran, the two strands, one lofty and humane, the other base, have continued to thrive side by side. In 1941, as Hitler was beginning to put in motion his murderous "final solution," the Iranian government convinced Nazi "race experts" that Iranian Jews had lived in Iran for 2,500 years, were fully assimilated members of the Persian nation and must be afforded all the rights of Iranian citizens.

The Nazis accepted the argument, and the lives of Iranian Jews residing in Europe were saved. Moreover, thousands of European Jews were saved when Iranian diplomats provided them with Iranian passports. And in the years after World War II, the Iranian government and people were exceedingly helpful - according to Israel's first ambassador to Iran - in facilitating the travel of hundreds of Iraqi Jews escaping persecution and heading for what was soon to be Israel.

Iran in fact was the first Muslim country to de facto recognize Israel and established close ties that lasted till 1979. But even then, the dread spirit of Haman was also in the air. As the Iranian government and many of its people were involved in helping Jews in their hour of need, there were also some ayatollahs who delivered fiery speeches against Jews, and against Israel. Clerical support for the oppression of Jews, which often hid its ugly head behind slogans against Zionism, began to emerge at the time.

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, he became the standard-bearer of this tradition. He paid lip service to the idea that Jews would be treated as equals in Iran. Islam, after all, affords Jews many rights as "people of the book." But in fact, Jews were subjected to many cruel and unjust punishments. The first nonmilitary, nongovernmental person sent to the firing squad by the Islamic revolutionary courts was a Jew, Habib Elganian, a prominent Iranian businessman.

In this sense, Ahmadinejad's shameful pronouncement about wiping the state of Israel off the map is more than another slip of tongue by a notoriously incompetent, loose-tongued president. Historically it conjures the spirit of Haman; politically it is the continuation of a policy that does not reflect Iranian history and character but caters to the lunatic fringe of Iranian politics, and of the Muslim world.

Ahmadinejad's comments must furthermore be seen in the context of the crisis the Islamic regime faces. For 25 years, the regime's cure for its own glaring incompetence has been to create a crisis. The European Union, particularly Britain, France and Germany, who had been for two decades dependable allies of the regime, has become increasingly estranged over Iran's nuclear adventurism and allegations of its support for terrorists in Iraq. Syria, the regime's only ally in the Middle East, is now politically on the ropes.

The domestic crisis is no less serious. The economy is in shambles. The stock market has lost about a third of its total value; the banking sector is all but collapsing; $200 billion dollars of capital has left Iran since the election, and there is increasing acrimony between different factions within the ruling clergy. Ahmadinejad's dangerous rhetoric was meant to energize the "base" and prepare them for the coming battles.

The captive people of Iran, or the millions forced into exile by the regime, must not be held responsible for the sins of the ruling cabal. Instead we must try to find ways to help the Iranian people achieve their hundred-year-old dream of democracy. Only in a genuine democracy can the spirit of Cyrus be truly celebrated and the shadow of Haman expunged.

(Abbas Milani is director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University and a co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.)

Tehran, Iran, Nov. 14 – An organisation set up by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is holding a rally in a provincial centre in north-east Iran on Tuesday as part of a nationwide drive to recruit volunteers for “martyrdom-seeking” operations, Iran Focus has learnt.

The event, dubbed “Palestinian intifada and martyrdom-seeking”, will be staged on the campus of the Industrial University of Shahroud. The keynote speaker will be Mohammad-Ali Samadi, the spokesman for the “Headquarters to Commemorate the Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement”.

Samadi is a senior officer of the Revolutionary Guards and his organisation is run by the IRGC in an effort to recruit potential suicide bombers. Organisers of the rally said the representative of the militant Palestinian group, Hamas, in Iran, Abu Othmama, will also speak at the rally.

“This event is part of a series of events that we have named ‘Daughters of the Olive’, and in addition to Tehran, similar rallies have already been held in Tabriz and Bushehr”, a local organiser told Iran Focus.

A film on “martyrdom-seeking operations” is planned to be shown at the gathering and a debate will be held regarding the guidelines for suicide operations from both Sunni and Shiite Islam’s perspectives and their impact on “the enemy”, the source added.

Earlier this month, radical fanatics signed up for suicide operations in Tehran to mark the end of the month of Ramadan.

Samadi said that 40,000 volunteers for suicide bombing operations had already enlisted to attack targets on the orders of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Application forms for suicide volunteers to sign up were distributed at the gathering.

The group’s organisers previously said that their targets were three-fold; U.S.-led forces in Iraq, Jews in Israel, and Salman Rushdie, who still has a fatwa against his head issue by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In October, Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has himself been a senior IRGC commander, openly called for the destruction of Israel and threatened Muslim countries developing ties with the Jewish states. “Israel must be wiped off the map”, he said.